We Changed the Trajectory of Life & Climate on Earth Long, Long Ago...

By Alex Wierbinski - Posted on 08 September 2019

ANTHROPOCENE

Mastodon
This long ago extinction is widely believed to have been caused by overexploitation by Clovis hunters. Their extinction only a very small part of the ongoing Quaternary extinction event that's really picking up speed nowadays... Wiki, Mastodon image on Pixabay.

We Changed the Trajectory of Life & Climate on Earth Long, Long Ago...

Long Effect
"Humans have been transforming Earth's ecology for thousands of years; far longer than previously known..."

Earth Transformed: By 2000BC
"An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by 3000 years ago, considerably earlier than the dates in the land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists."

Old & New Transformations
"...challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon."

Not Natural
"The earlier start times for land use revealed by this study have profound implications for understanding and modelling contemporary global changes in land use, climate and biodiversity around the world."

A Delicate System
Our, "original," transformations of the Earth during ancient times, starting with ancient, stone-aged human hunting activities, which led to these first ancient anthropogenic changes noted by science above, are but an incredibly small percentage of the current magnitude of the physical effect of humans on our planet today.

Scales of Influence
Since that small number of ancient humans so significantly changed that much of Nature way back then, it's kind of hard to wrap our mind around the scale of the contemporary damages our current vast population of 7.7 billion is doing to the balances of Climate & Nature on our planet right now.
Our faint footsteps deep in the past pushed the planet onto a whole new trajectory of climate and ecology, and today we're hitting our planet with a very, very large club, when we compare our current and ancient influences.

A Long Trajectory of Change
So, if the relatively small-scale activities of the 300 million ancient humans alive in 1 AD, along with their previous thousand years of ancestors (even less folks), had already knocked our planet off its natural and traditional trajectory of climate, weather, and ecology as discovered by the study above, then next we've got to try to imagine not just what the Natural bounty of the ancient world's fertility was like back then, to imagine what we've lost as we've grown from that technologically, "primitive," point, (with humans deeply engaged with and within sophisticated ecosystems), to our current multi-billion person, "high tech," population (with humans living in high-tech isolation within massive eco-destroying megacities), and what that huge population's doing to the tattered remnants of our ancient planet's dying fertility.

Then we've got to use our perception and reflection to contemplate exactly where this irresponsible growth is directing our future.

The, "kids," are not, and will not, be, "OK," along the current trajectory of our socio-economic policies and practices.

Endless Growth Brings a Grim Future
I'm glad (lucky!) I'm old, and I feel sorry for the youth of today who's lives are based on, and dependent upon the rapidly self-discrediting philosophy of endless growth and meaningless self-gratification, on this already depleted planet.

Contradiction
I'm afraid the billions and billions of the youth of today are getting more and more deeply wedged-into the brutal metaphysical contradiction existing between the psychological lies justifying their desires for endlessly growing self-gratification, against the physical limits of the clear reality of the rapidly diminishing fertility of our planet.

Nature Rebalances
Nature on Earth is in the process of rebalancing this human contradiction between Nature's reality and our warped perceptions.
Nature will force resolution and balance, on the human side of this equation by adjusting the failures of our perceptions and motivations back to reality, by eliminating the physical basis of the lies supporting this, our ourburst of endless irresponsible greed-driven growth. Nature typically does this by reducing water availability and overall ecosystem fertility.
Nature will eliminate our, "misperceptions," (our greedy lies), by continuing along its current path of radically reducing global freshwater and fertility. These reductions in freshwater & fertility are already, and going to continue to leave huge and growing populations vulnerable to great deprivations & death. That's what Nature does, when you screw around with It...

Declining Sophistication
The collapse of land, sea, and flying animal populations we are currently watching, along with the effects of changing climate and weather on global agricultural production, are all rapidly reaching a point that will clearly reveal to even the greediest and stupidest folks the depth and severity of damages our irresponsible growth has caused to our planet, its climates, and its ecosystems. Oh, and to us, its people.

I credit our social sophistication to the complexity and fertility of nature. We humans are a reflection of the sophistication of our planet, in a manner of speaking, being the focus point of, first, perception, then eventually, abstract self-reflection. These are the rewards that the natural fertility and complexity of our planet have made possible.

Rise & Fall of Fertility
This natural fertility and intensity of our planet is what's fueled our success as humans. As our behavior continues to reduce the natural complexity and the fertility of the natural world that created us, so too will our social sophistication, our powers of perception and abstract reflection, and their future potentials, shrink in lockstep with our continuing lobotomization of the climate and ecosystems driving the fertility of our natural world.
Qur damaging the intense fertility of our planet already has, is, and will continue to be felt more and more deeply by billions as we continue down the path of allowing our very real endless greed to drive the delusion of, "endless growth," further and closer to the point of triggering a global ecological collapse.

I made You Something…
It is ironic that the complexity and fertility of this Earth, the very bountiful environment that made our evolution as humans even possible, was in fact creating and focusing the very tools of perception and abstraction into us humans, who've used our perception and abstraction to form ourselves into the weapon that would destroy the very framework of natural fertility on this planet that created us humans in the first place.

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